Physical Design, Call Quality, and Internet Connection
Nokia makes beautiful hardware, and the Astound is gorgeous. It’s made of smooth metal, classy plastic, and expensive-looking glass, and has a bit of the air of a fashion object. At 4.6 ounces it’s solid but not too heavy, and at a well-rounded 4.6 by 2.2 by 0.4 inches (HWD) it fits very easily in your hand.
The 3.5-inch, 640-by-360 touch screen looks a little bit dim indoors, but works unusually well outdoors in sunlight. On the right-hand side of the handset, there’s a useful hardware lock switch, a dedicated Camera button, and Volume buttons. The Astound feels like a $180 phone, not an $80 one.
There’s no physical keyboard, so to enter text and numbers you need to use the two touch keyboards. Neither is as good as the touch keyboards on the top touch-screen phones. The portrait-style keyboard has insanely small keys, but it’s fine if you have precise fingers. The landscape keyboard is more usable, but it takes over the entire screen so you can’t see the box you’re typing into. Both keyboards are significantly enhanced if you turn on Swype, which lets you drag your finger across the keyboard without hunting and tapping.
The Astound has an unusual radio setup: an HSPA 10.2 radio with quad-band EDGE and 850/900/AWS/2100MHz 3G support. The speed is between 3G and 4G (although it feels slower because of the slow Web browser) and the radio works well on T-Mobile’s and foreign networks, but won’t work well on AT&T, since it doesn’t hit 1900 MHz 3G. The phone also connects to 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, and works as a wired modem for your laptop, with the right service plan.
Reception is good; call quality is excellent. The Astound’s earpiece and speakerphone both deliver top-notch sound: loud, clear and rich. The microphone lets through quite a lot of background noise, but it doesn’t overwhelm voices. Battery life was acceptable, if not terrific at 5 hours and 3 minutes of talk time.
The phone paired easily with my Aliph Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129.99, 4.5 stars), but voice dialing was frustratingly inaccurate in my tests. While I could trigger it with the headset, I couldn’t make it connect any calls properly.
Happily, T-Mobile’s Wi-Fi calling feature is supported here. This makes the Astound a great phone for international travel, as you can save big bucks by turning off roaming and using Wi-Fi hotspots to make your calls.
OS, Apps, and Weird Features
The Astound runs the latest version of the Symbian^3 OS, which Nokia aims to essentially abandon in favor of Windows Phone 7 within the next few years. The company has sketched out some upcoming software updates and insists that development goes on, but it’s hard to reconcile “we’re abandoning this OS!” with “we’re as passionate about it as ever!”
This version of Symbian is faster and more responsive than the sluggish software on Nokia’s N8, but it still had trouble registering some touches and would occasionally throw up a perplexing error like “Out of Memory” or ask “End packet data connection Web2Go?” A few times it locked up and needed a reboot.
Symbian^3 has some good features, most notably excellent multitasking, but I find it more difficult to use than other smartphone OSes; the menu layout just isn’t intuitive for people who don’t already have Symbian phones. Several times reviewing Symbian phones, I’ve needed help figuring out how to do basic tasks, like replace home screen widgets or make the mapping program create a route between two points. I’m not a cell phone or smartphone beginner. If you aren’t familiar with Symbian (as most Americans aren’t) you’ll find the lessons you’ve brought over from other devices may not be useful here.
The three home screens come pre-loaded with useful widgets displaying your e-mail, calendar, and social-networking updates. You can download more widgets from Nokia’s Ovi Store.
The Web browser supports pinch-to-zoom and displays desktop Web pages accurately. It supports multiple windows and RSS feeds. But it’s slow; timed on several popular Web pages using the same Wi-Fi network, the Editors’ Choice T-Mobile MyTouch 4G ($199, 4.5 stars) loaded pages up to twice as fast.
Nokia piles in excellent texting, e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook support, and you get third-party Twitter and IM clients that are even better than the built-in software. E-mail syncs with Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, Yahoo, and other services, including full HTML messages and viewing attachments through the built-in Microsoft Office and PDF viewers.
There are two GPS apps: T-Mobile’s $9.99-a-month TeleNav GPS Navigator and Nokia’s free Ovi Maps. Ovi Maps looks great, and offers walking or driving directions with live traffic support. TeleNav lets you speak your starting and ending locations. Ovi Maps locked into my location quickly and offered accurate walking directions to a local restaurant.
The appearance of the BlackBerry Orlando is kind of surprising, but since all of RIM’s other new handsets we’ve seen leak lately feature touch input, why not give the lower-end Curve the same treatment? There’s no word on exactly when we can expect to actually see the Orlando arrive on store shelves, but considering that the other unannounced BlackBerrys that have leaked lately will almost assuredly be made official at BlackBerry World at the beginning of May, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the touch-enabled Orlando made official then, too. Stay tuned.
